think about it, there must be higher love
down in the heart or hidden in the stars above
Isle does not notice the cold, nor does she notice the sky and the trees and the grass bent beneath their feet. Not at first. At first she notices how much louder the thoughts are out here. They are easier to make out, the sound of them, but harder to understand because the voices, the thought voices, jumble together. She shakes head once and her ears slap-slap against her skull. This world is loud, and she loves it.
When Wyck finds his balance and appears by her side, she touches his face and his neck and his shoulder with velvet lips before tucking her chin over his withers and pulling him close. She likes the way their hearts feel beating together again. She can feel his excitement in the quiver of his skin, can hear it in the fervor of his thoughts. “You did!” She agrees pulling him closer, not thinking it strange that he didn’t have to speak aloud for her to hear him (it had been that way for as long as she had known conscious thought).
And then father (oh she likes him, likes the way his eyes sparkled when she reached inside her mothers thoughts) uses a word that neither child knew, though Isle knew a little more than Wyck from the pieces of thought she could knit together between mother and father. “What is mute?” Her little voice is soft and imploring as she tugs her brother even closer still.
Oksana answers, bundling them close beneath her wing.
“See Wyck?” Isle says and her voice is just a whisper of warmth in his tiny, swiveled ear. “Not bad, not broken.” And in fact the idea that her brother could be anything less than perfect is a completely alien, completely impossible thought. “You’re you, Wyck.”
ISLE